how do i stop the iphone from downloading all my mail

I have had to reset my iphone and update the firmware. My last backup of my phone is bad, so I cannot restore from a backup. In the process I have had to re-establish my email but the iphone wants to download "every" message from my pop mail account. I cant get it to stop and there are about 500 messages. I have seen some similar threads regarding mac books and such but nothing on this. I have a yahoo pop mail account.

Any ideas on how to stop this? I would like to only get the current emails

changing the amount displayed does not work. if you put 25 or 50 or whatever it will keep that amount. So it loads the first 50, then i delete them, and it loads the next 50 and so on. I will try the folder option. it is odd, you would think that it would be a no brainer to have the iphone not get old messages.

Have people been fighting this since the iphone came out? I only just noticed it because when i got the iphone I set up a mail account at the same time, and now I am doing a restore it wants all the mail for the last year.

The issues here is the POP protocol and how it works, and how a client keeps track of messages it has retrieved.

When your email client connects to the server, it asks for a list of messages on the server. Each message has a unique message identifier. It is the job of the mail program to store a list of all the message IDs it has already downloaded, and to not download them again.

The only way to prevent this and still use POP is to remove the messages from the INBOX on the server so that the client doesn't get that list when it connects. Often you can do this using the webmail interface for the account, or if you use IMAP from your desktop, by creating a new folder and moving all your old mail out of the inbox to that folder.

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